Was Google Really Censoring Elhaik's Khazar Research in 2013?
In 2013, Dr. Elhaik complained about his home page at John Hopkins University mysteriously disappearing from google searches right after his first Jewish genomics paper started to gain attention. We reproduced his complaint here, and then his page came back on top again after a few days.
Google Censorship: Scariest Thing for Academic Freedom
Readers found those accusations rather hysterical and attributed the disappearance (and reappearance) to something as mundane as ‘search algorithm update’. It was a time before Snowden release, when the crooks running Google and Facebook were seen as various reincarnations of Buddha.
It is increasingly becoming clear that those ‘search algorithms’ and ‘trending news’ may be more than something generated by a fully-automated cluster of servers near Oregon-Washington border processing large amount of clicks and links. In 2014, RT posted an article on “Censorship war: Website unmasks links Google is blocking from search results”, but the evidence of censorship was still indirect. More direct evidence regarding Facebook came yesterday, when Gizmodo published -
Want to Know What Facebook Really Thinks of Journalists? Here’s What Happened When It Hired Some
According to former team members interviewed by Gizmodo, this small group has the power to choose what stories make it onto the trending bar and, more importantly, what news sites each topic links out to. We choose whats trending, said one. There was no real standard for measuring what qualified as news and what didnt. It was up to the news curator to decide.
….
They were also told to select articles from a list of preferred media outlets that included sites like the New York Times, Time, Variety, and other traditional outlets. They would regularly avoid sites like World Star Hip Hop, The Blaze, and Breitbart, but were never explicitly told to suppress those outlets. They were also discouraged from mentioning Twitter by name in headlines and summaries, and instead asked to refer to social media in a broader context.
News curators also have the power to deactivate (or blacklist) a trending topica power that those we spoke to exercised on a daily basis. A topic was often blacklisted if it didnt have at least three traditional news sources covering it, but otherwise the protocol was murkymeaning a curator could ostensibly blacklist a topic without a particularly good reason for doing so. (Those we interviewed said they didnt see any signs that blacklisting was being abused or used inappropriately.)
CNET summarized the article in one line that says all -
Facebook’s trending news feed may be a sham
The world’s largest social network calls out the top trending stories on its site, which is visited by more than a billion people every day. But the list may be manipulated by Facebook’s employees, who are allegedly deciding what’s “trending” based on their political views.
Zerohedge reports -
Facebook Workers Admit They “Routinely” Suppressed Conservative News
Therefore, we reopen our old question - was Google really censoring (i.e. manually filtering out) Elhaik’s Khazar research in its search results? Answer to this question is important, because many researchers now rely on searches at google scholar, whose results are now seen as sacrosanct as Google searches in 2013.
We presume answers will not be coming anytime soon given that Google has bigger issues to resolve :)
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